Mark Power Book Dummy Review – Magnum Photo

The first book review was with Mark Power. I was the last person to present my work to Mark so I had a chance to listen to the feedback from others and reflect on the information to my dummy. A number of people showed dummies that contained just photographs and Mark suggested that the inclusion of archival material could help their books to appeal beyond the photobook sector. My book dummy included some archival material to help tell the story.

When it was my time to show Mark my book dummy I explain the history of the building and the story to date.

Mark provided the following feedback on my dummy. He felt the fact that images were back to back made the images overwhelming. He suggested that having blank pages would allow the reader to focus on specific images and only to pair images where they had a strong connection.

He felt that a different book format could help tell the story and advised me to look use design cues from document that might have been used at the Water Treatment Plant and explore different images size on the pages. I decided to sketch a few ideas based on Mark’s feedback.

Mark wanted to know more about the building, I explained that the Museum are currently considering plans for the building’s redevelopment. He recommended that I should stay with the project and record the transformation of the building similar to the Treasury Project that he undertook that followed the redevelopment of the Treasury building in London.

Mark’s feedback was useful and provided me with some possibilities to allow the reader to engage with my book as a hyper mediated object which was not something I had considered when I created the 3rd Dummy. Limiting the number of double page images would create space for the images to breath and I could use the facing page to title each image. I considered adding chemical equations for the water treatment process similar to the way Mark added weather forecast information to his book “Shipping Forecast”.